September 30, 2005
Road
Scott Peck was a child of an “unchurched” family. He once told that on his one and only trip to Sunday School as a little boy he was handed a picture to color. It was of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. He never went back.
He named his first book, “The Road Less Traveled.” He said it was not after Robert Frost. In all likelihood, it could have been after himself. Its first paragraph of only one sentence reads, “Life is difficult.” Since 1978, it has sold more than six million copies in North America and has been translated into twenty languages. By the mid-1990s, the book had made 258 appearances on The New York Times Magazine weekly bestseller list before it was removed by the editors in self-defense.
He styled himself as a cigarette-smoking, martini-drinking evangelist and frequently said that the more he learned, the less he knew. He asked a Methodist clergy friend to read the first draft of the Road only to be told that it was all in the New Testament. So he read the New Testament, called his friend, said he wanted to be baptized. Subsequently, he was, by that same Methodist parson using the Book of Common Prayer, in the chapel of an upstate New York convent surrounded by the Episcopal nuns for whom he was a consulting psychiatrist.
Shortly after the book began to hit the charts, I served as one of many seminar leaders for his lecture venture at the Kanuga Center in North Carolina. A record crowd of over four hundred swelled the auditorium to hear him. At the opening session, his first words were, “Faith is a bitch.” Then he began to demonstrate what he meant.
When he said that the only way to peace in the world is for the US&A to surrender its extensive armaments unilaterally into the hands of the United Nations, a whole gang of folk got up and left. Many of them, we learned later, were retired military. As a navy WWII veteran, I joined all the rest who gave him a standing ovation.
On the last night of that conference, we all queued up and marched through the Center, Peck in the lead, me on trumpet playing and everybody singing, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Scott Peck died a few days ago. He was surely still on that same Road, marching, but now joined by millions.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]